The Tell Tale Heart
by reelProjector
Summary: Standard David/Elizabeth after-movie continuation story. Rated for probable lemon in future chapters and dark themes. The title comes from a short work of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe.
1. Chapter 1

Elizabeth makes her way slowly down the dark, quiet, seemingly vast hall of the Engineers' ship. The angle of its arc and the ship itself are just large enough to give the impression, when one walks slowly enough, that it could never end. She walks this slowly, inching along and now coming to a complete halt to support herself against one dark wall and gaze down, examining her shoes in detail. She can't seem to ever catch her breathe, lately.

Elizabeth isn't sure what she wants to do. She knows just what she does not want to do—go back to the control room and face David—but she also knows she must.

She had left David's head in David's own twitching arms—an unnerving sight—after he had talked her through the initial start-up of the ship. She practically sprinted out after that. The world around her had stopped moving at the relentless pace it had maintained for the last few days, and it was now Elizabeth's own head that was whirling too quickly for her to keep up. She remembered all at once how tired, dizzy, nauseated, hungry and broken she was as the pieces of her world, which had shattered around her, pierced through her like shards of broken glass through the arm of a too-curious child who had just accidentally sent her arm through a glass sliding door. So she ran out as fast as the gut-wrenching pain below her stomach would permit, ignoring David's pleas.

She ran and ran until her legs could carry her no farther, and then she fell to her knees as terrible dry heaves shook her body. Though it so desperately needed to purge itself, Elizabeth's stomach had nothing in it. She couldn't even vomit properly in this state. She beat the ground with a gloved hand and held back the tears that were threatening to spill out with the lack-of-vomit. She refused to pity herself; she refused to cry. She had broken down once already outside Vickers' escape pod—she refused to do it again. She needed to keep going. She needed to get her answers because they were not just hers; they were also Charlie's answers, and he deserved them more than anyone, having died for them. So she made a fist of the hand that, beneath the suit's glove, had Charlie's ring on it and pushed herself off the ground with it.

But none of her resolve mattered then. Elizabeth hadn't looked where she had stopped when she collapsed, and it happened to be in front of the same kind of door that they had first encountered when back on the other ship with the whole team—the door David first opened, unleashing all the horror. Memories of this horror flooded her mind again and she was unable to restrain the tears this time around. So Elizabeth had sat there for a long time, clutching her mouth to contain her sobs and screams.

Now she is almost embarrassed to face the android again. She lets the wall go and continues her agonizingly slow journey back to the ship's center, the controls and David. Elizabeth deliberately walks on cat-like steps and watches her breathing. She still hasn't caught her breathe from running and crying and screaming, so quieting it has spiked her heart rate. She can hear her own heart pumping blood now, the sound is all-dominating as the blood rushes in her ears, and she doesn't like it at all.

She tries to take even quieter steps, though she can't hear just how quiet they are over the sound of her own heart. She doesn't want David to become aware of her presence just yet. He unnerves her because she can't figure him out. He has been incredibly pleasant and polite—as per the usual—especially considering that in the last few hours, she had stuck his head in a duffel bag, hauled him into this ship and launched it off to God-knows what danger and destination. She doesn't _want_ to dislike or distrust him, but her perception of him is cast only in the light of his betrayal. He betrayed her and Charlie and the crew for Weyland. She couldn't really blame him of course—Weyland was his creator and programmer—but the betrayal still stung, especially after her initial fondness toward him. She enjoyed his wit and company and he saved her life, but Weyland caused their relationship to sour.

And now he was gone, as David had wished. Hinted he wished. Hinted he would wish if he was able to. In any case, now David had his free will. Now David acted of his own accord. Shaw couldn't help but swallow nervously. She didn't know if she found this more or less unnerving.

"Dr. Shaw? Elizabeth, are you back?"

_Dammit_. Her heartbeat is a drum and the blood rushing in her ears a roaring waterfall, but it couldn't have been either of those he heard…could it?

"Yes, David. I am here." She announces sleepily as she wobbles toward the android.

"You are very pale and your eyes are red. You have been crying." The words initially sound not like an attempt to comfort but a medical analysis and diagnosis of some sort. The last four words, Elizabeth thinks, seem softer, like he is feeling her anguish. But she is also so, so dizzy and he unable to feel her sadness. She stands there feebly willing the room to stay still. David's twitching body is seated in the pilot's chair, his own head in his lap. Elizabeth hobbles up to the chair from behind and grasps it for support. She stands there listening to her own heartbeat.

At her silence, David tries again, "We have only taken off, Dr. Shaw. No course to your Engineers' home planet has been charted."

She wants to scream again. And she wants to tell him also that the Engineers aren't hers. That she doesn't want them anymore. She wants to tell him that they are Charlie's, and she wants to abandon them and go home. And she is ashamed again. She is ashamed to face David and ashamed that she wants to abandon Charlie and his answers. The words all fail her and she looks down at her feet.

"Elizabeth?"

She exhales sharply, pushes off, rounds the chair and stares David straight in the eye.

"Could you show me how to repair you, if there is any way? I'm too dizzy to deal with the star charts now." She can't hear her own words over her blasted heartbeat but she wills a hint of a joyless smile on her face. She wills herself to trust him and to be stronger than this. If he betrays her again she doubts she'd live through it, but if she refuses to trust him, she knows neither of them will be fixed ever again.

David instantly perks up, a delighted smile gracing his features. "Certainly," he says, "but I need to understand the degree of the damage. If you could please listen and tell me if you still hear my heart beating that would be a great help."

She quirks an eyebrow. Her own heartbeat is so loud right now that she finds it hard to believe David can't simply hear his from his position on his own lap.

"That would help me assess if the damage has spread further down from the point of separation," he continues, explaining for her benefit, but she is already leaning down. She finds it curious that he would even have a heartbeat and somehow it makes him easier to trust. She doesn't know why.

With her ear against his chest she feels his light twitching and the artificial warmth radiating out of him, but she can't hear anything he says over the heartbeat. She does not know if it is his or hers or theirs in unison but she knows it's impossibly loud.


	2. Chapter 2

Thanks for the reviews! It's always nice to hear back. ^^

Oh and I fixed the spelling of Edgar Allan Poe, thanks for pointing out the mistake. And sorry this chapter is even shorter, but they will get longer from here. Promise;)

-reelProjector

Elizabeth Shaw is holding David's head, propping it on its own body. She stands behind the robot with her own head facing away from him. She's trying her best not to vomit. The clicks and hisses his body makes as his artificial spine endeavors to reconnect itself—as David has reassured her it will—are horrifically far from human. Dr. Shaw has her eyes closed and is willing her hands not to move; their trembling combined with the light tremors that shock David's body every few seconds are surely not doing much to help the spine reattach itself. Some deep part of her tells her it isn't too late to rip off his head and throw it across the room. Some other part says that once the mechanical clicking and hissing stop, she'll have something that she can pretend is human—something (no definitely not someone, something) to keep her from going insane of solitude on this journey. Her father always said she had a very good imagination.

Dr. Shaw opens her eyes briefly and then closes them again. The room is still spinning and her heart is still thumping. She doesn't imagine it is good that her heart-rate is through the roof right now but chooses not to worry about it. As the room spins on, however, she does wonder—from a solely scientific standpoint—how much damage it would do if she turned her head and vomited into David's insides.

The thought pleases her in a deranged way and the action seems to Elizabeth to mirror philosophically what he's done to her: retching on his most inner workings—the parts that make him who he is. She is almost certain he had a direct hand in killing Charlie. She is almost certain he is deadly.

David's head abruptly snaps forward, waking her out of her reverie and scaring her out of her wits. Her eyes fly open and she rounds the control chair in which he is seated to bend down and look at his face, now gazing down at the floor. Elizabeth panics. David looks dead. His eyes are closed and his white blood is seeping through the torn collar of his suit and dripping down his torso. Elizabeth gets a handful of it as she reaches to press her ear to his chest and check for a heartbeat again. Her panic causes her own to echo in her ears again and she still cannot make his out for certain. She leans back, keeping a hand on his shoulder and stares at the top of his head, listens to God-only-knows-whose heartbeat in her ears, and panics some more.

She has blasted off into space on a ship she does not know how to pilot with a dead (broken? What doesn't really live cannot die…can it?) android. She cannot set a course for the Engineers world or for Earth. She cannot even return to where Charlie died to join him peacefully. She does not trust herself alone. Suicide is a Godless sin.

David's sickeningly calm voice does not even startle her; it only makes the room resume its spinning, which has become comforting. She prefers not to see this reality straight.

"There we are—fundamentally reconnected. If you would be so kind as to pull together the color-coded wires at the base of my neck that would be a great help. Thank you Dr. Shaw."

She positions herself behind the chair again, leaning over it from the side, since it is very tall and reaches a shaky hand for the wires he's mentioned. Elizabeth is so glad to see that there are many, many wires of various lengths and thicknesses to connect. It will take a bit of time and mindless effort, like a children's puzzle game. The more the activity is mindless and brain-like, the less Elizabeth is forced to remember that it is probably her death that she is assembling. At least if David strangles or beats or rips her to death, it will not be a sin. Only human beings can sin.

"That's right Dr. Shaw, just hold the wires together, the electric current and magnetic attraction should do the trick from there. Do be careful you don't hold them too close to the point of disconnect, however. You would get shocked." He addresses her almost like a child, she thinks, commending her for performing well and warning about possible dangers. His voice is attempting to be gentle and comforting.

Elizabeth thinks she might want a sizeable electric current through her. She wants to feel anything but this nausea.

She silently finishes attaching all the wires and receives a painful dizzy spell when she looks up into the broader space. David is already talking—close by but also somewhere far in the distance. He's even standing and moving an arm up and down slowly. He's turning and thanking her and smiling that eerie smile.

It's the last thing she sees as the darkness at the edges of her vision spreads and engulfs her. The last thing she hears is her name off his lips as she feels arms wrap around her back—suffocating, not comforting—and she thinks the cool, white blood feels nice against her burning cheek when it presses to his chest and that ownerless, thundering heartbeat.


	3. Chapter 3

Thanks again for the reviews! I'm very glad at least some of you seem to think Elizabeth is in character. I really like her as a character because she has so much depth to her but it also makes her wicked hard to write. I'm also considering doing a chapter or two from David's point of view. Thoughts on that please?

-reelProjector

Elizabeth is on a dusty, dry road somewhere in Africa. She has an arm propped above her brow to minimize the punishing sun's glare. She's watching a long procession of tribal elders walk slowly by and they all seem like giants to her—much bigger than regular men. Maybe it's only that she is smaller. She wears a loose polka-dotted sundress that she distinctly remembers her father buying for her when she was ten. It was a silly dress that did not fit her and sat lopsided on her small frame, but how was he to know? He was a father after all, and to 10-year-old Elizabeth, a mother was for buying dresses and a father for making them filthy with adventure-ridden dirt.

As the procession draws to an end, the penultimate foursome of elders passes Elizabeth, carrying a man on a sleek, impeccably white, very anachronistic, futuristic glowing examination slab with four poles at each of its ends, topped with proper traditional tribal decoration. The man on the slab is strangely, Elizabeth notices with some curiosity, caucasian. Stranger still, he is not covered in anyway. From her present distance, Elizabeth cannot quite tell who he is, but she does see that his face is distorted—grossly disfigured with black veins and bruise-like discolorations on his skin. He seems so painfully familiar, but she has forgotten the face—like a foggy event from a dream, not to be recalled in perfect detail in the morning.

She isn't sure if it's the glare of the sun playing tricks on her eyes, but she thinks she sees the dead man writhe in agony. She opens her mouth to tell them they've made a mistake and that he isn't dead, but the increasing volume of their foreign funeral song and her heavily accented native tongue swallow her intent to help.

The last man in the procession is her father. Elizabeth rejoices—he can surely tell them they're making a horrible mistake! She calls out to her father but he doesn't hear. She tries to run forward but she is suddenly immobilized. She can't move any of her body parts even an inch and fear and panic seize her. As tears spill out of her eyes, she feels a weight on her shoulders—someone's strong, large hands are steadying her, comforting her, and she can move again; the stranger's cool hands have fixed her. They've even taken away the burning in her shoulders caused by the sun. The hands reach up and gently wipe away her tears. But who is this? It couldn't be her father; he's still walking in the other direction.

Elizabeth glances up, but the stranger's face is silhouetted in the sun's glare and she cannot make out who it is.

"…are you alright?" – It's Charlie's voice she hears. But then the horrific realization hits her. That's who was on the slab. The man she forgot. The love she forgot. She feels the need to run to his side, to ameliorate her betrayal. She starts to move, but the hands are holding her shoulders too tightly to permit it.

"…Elizabeth?"

The man moves his head to block the sun and she recognizes David the android.

"Let go!" Elizabeth Shaw snaps as her eyes fly open and her hands go up to seize David's elbows that are hovering over her. She tries to lunge up, but his hands on her shoulders restrain her. When she calms and recovers from the agitation caused by her dream, she feels slightly guilty for screaming at him. He has, after all, evidently been caring for her. He is wearing only a black, short-sleeve t-shirt with the Weyland Corporation symbol on the chest in white and light beige pants, as she is sprawled out on his rubber-like, surprisingly soft spacesuit. He has begun removing her suit also but has only thus far revealed her shoulders, which he is still grasping.

"Sorry…" Elizabeth says with a hint of embarrassment, avoiding his gaze.

"That's quite alright," responds David faithfully, "My apologies for waking you, but you seemed to be having a nightmare. You were crying and screaming in your sleep and I felt it would be best I not leave you in such a state. I'm sorry to have startled you, Dr. Shaw."

Elizabeth swallows and her throat burns, a lot. The rest of her burns too, she notices when David removes his comfortingly cool hands from her shoulders. She tries to smile up at him in gratitude as he speaks but with the word "nightmare" remembers their conversation the last time he woke her after she fainted—she does not like that this is becoming a habit. Her hands instinctively clutch at her neck for her father's cross and she finds it is still there. She sighs in relief.

Her view is hazy, but David seems, for a fraction of a second, indignant—as if offended that she assumed he would take her cross again. This passes and he continues, "You also appear to be running a fever."

Shaw stares up at him weakly. That would explain the burning up she's presently experiencing. She wants to say something, anything, but can't really get the words out. She can't move either, like in her dream. She hates feeling this helpless and she wishes more than anything that the damned room would stop its spinning. She also wishes David would stop making that face at her; the android has his eyebrows raised and knitted in pity. It's seems so intense to Shaw, simulated and over done—almost mocking her on purpose. She tries to keep her resentment to a low simmer. She doesn't want it to come boiling up again. She doesn't think it wise to snap at the somewhat powerful being hanging possessively over her again, especially while he's treating her and she's in this admittedly pitiable state. God, she wishes the room would stop spinning.

David, meanwhile, has produced a cloth and some water from the utility pouch he pulled off his suit before creating her makeshift bed. He presses first his cool hand to her burning forehead and she already feels a minor relief. He doesn't tell her what her temperature is, his brow just furrows again, and he resembles all the doctors that she and Charlie used to visit—the ones who pitied her too much to even give her the painful diagnosis, as if it would be any easier to bear with time and a stranger's pity.

David now rests the cloth on her forehead and pours the water gingerly on it. Elizabeth frowns, noting that his hand on her head was more comforting—somehow after its coolness, the water seems lukewarm. Completing the action he smiles at her. He smiles more often now then he did before, aboard Prometheus, she also notes. She finds it funny in an awful way—what does he have to smile at now that she has absolutely nothing left to improve her mood? Except this, that is—the little observations about David that she finds lightly humorous.

"May I have a look?" He asks, gesturing toward her stomach, "it might be infected."

She nods half-heartedly, and he proceeds to slide more of the suit off her. Elizabeth stares at his face while he stares at the work of his hands. This time his brow it knitted with concern. And Elizabeth knows why too, suddenly, because suddenly she can smell the putrid stink of her own wound—a combination, in reality, of her unchanged undergarments, fermenting in her blood and umbilical cord fluids and the infected wound. With great effort, she tears her gaze away from David and her head off the floor and peers down her body to get a look. The infection is scarily serious, with the skin around the staples bright red and the discoloration spreading up her tummy. She lets out a shaky breath. David's eyes snap to her raised head and then back down to her wound as he shifts quickly to examine it in more detail. In doing so, he blocks her view, just like he pushed the monitor with her unborn fetus away from her. Though last time she would have died had she left things up to him, her severely weakened state and the absence of a MedPod to run too gave her little choice but to trust him.

So, Shaw lets out another breathe, heavier this time, and rests her head back on David's suit and watches David shift over her. He leans just close enough once and she tries to crane and turn her neck again to listen to his heartbeat. She doesn't get the chance, he shifts away too quickly and she is left saddened. She thinks somehow that listening to their heartbeats again would help her trust him enough to give her this necessary treatment. Unfortunately, his has gotten away and hers has quieted down, and the deathly quiet in the room scares her. She misses the roaring heartbeats in her ears.

David has finished off the last of the water in his pouch to rinse her wound and has still gotten through only half of it. He reaches into the pouch once more and takes out some regular-brand pain relief pills in a small container. He sets them next to her head and stands up so quickly it makes him spin along with the room in her eyes.

"I am going to locate the water supply on this ship," he announces. She needs more water to swallow the pills with and rinse the second half of her wound. He's going to find it for her; she registers weakly a sense of gratitude.

"Hopefully I will also find a first aid or medical station," he continues, then pauses and adds, "Please try to get some rest, D-…Elizabeth—you dearly need it in your condition."

He says her first name tentatively and stutters a D for doctor to the beginning. That is the first time she's ever heard him misspeak or falter in his usually flawless speech, diction and pronunciation. She wonders if the tearing off and reattaching of his head isn't to blame. He is almost to the doorway when her sense of gratitude catches up with these thoughts.

"David!" It comes out even weaker then she'd hoped.

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

He glances over his shoulder and gives her a smile that makes her feel like the two of them are part of some kind of secret inside joke that no one else is privy to.

"My pleasure, as always."


End file.
